working women

I’m beyond delighted to briBeyondBalancePanelng you this post from my friends over at Women Employed, a Chicago-based advocacy organization that mobilizes people and organizations to expand educational and employment opportunities for America’s working women. Below, Adriana Díaz, the Communications Manager at Latino Policy Forum and a leader of the Advocacy Council at Women Employed, muses poignantly and shares knowledge on how we work. Follow her on Twitter @adriana9diaz.  -Deborah

A few weeks ago, I lost several hours of sleep to an irregular bout of insomnia. I went to work grouchy, brain hazy, and started to complain to my coworker—when I realized that she, as a mother of two children under the age of 3, ran on an average of five hours of sleep a night. A sleepless night seemed trivial in the moment, but in our water cooler conversation we gained perspective in our lifestyle differences, and in our shared privileges as women employed by our office—we both work for a company that values family support and work-life balance and offers flexible scheduling for salaried employees to meet those needs. For example, my coworker works 8 to 4 to accommodate her family’s childcare needs. I work 10 to 6. Bonus: we both get to work from home once a week.

While it may seem like a small perk to some, my coworker and I recognize that having flexibility in our workplace is a huge benefit to our quality of life. To be sure our conversation was an “a-ha!” moment for me on workplace issues; one of many I’ve had since becoming an Advocacy Council member at Women Employed (WE) more than a year ago. For too many working women—the benefits my coworker and I view as a given, control over our schedules, paid sick days, maternity leave—are out of reach.

So how do we create conditions in which all of us can thrive?

Beyond Balance, a panel discussion hosted by WE, dived into this very question last week. The engaging conversation was moderated by WE Executive Director Anne Ladky and included panelists Susan Lambert, University of Chicago, Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration; Iliana Mora, COO at Erie Family Health Center and WE Board member; and Rex Huppke, Chicago Tribune journalist of the popular workplace column, “I Just Work Here.”

The full program is available to watch on CAN-TV, but here are a few more a-ha moments I had that I hope you can learn from too:

  • There is no work-life balance for low-wage workers.
    • As 80 percent of minimum wage workers are adults, and 59 percent are women, Illiana Mora reminded us that for many balance is out of the question, “It’s work, work, work, work, work, work and more work. What they’re talking about is really, survival.”
  • Paying workers well, providing fair schedules and paid time off is not just great for employees, it’s great for business! Employee morale, health and loyalty suffer in industries with low wages and unpredictable schedules. This leads to high turnover among other incurred costs. Susan Lambert said, “We want strong businesses, we want firms to employ people and a strong economy. But the literature shows if you treat people well it pays off too.”
  • Millennials deserve their due credit for revolutionizing the workplace. The demographic is now the largest portion of the workforce and has a strong commitment to social justice.
    • Rex Huppke made the point that Millennial men want to be involved with their families: “Every generation will have its negative side…but Millennials have come along and said, ‘if you don’t provide me with the kind of things I find important, basically the work-life balance issues, then forget it, I’m going somewhere else.’ And then they just leave.”

Catch more highlights here. Interested in learning more about creating fairer workplaces? Visit Women Employed’s website.

Screen shot 2013-12-06 at 10.11.16 AMThe following is a guest post by Anne Ladky, Executive Director of Women Employed

Food stamps, slashed. Hundreds of protests over low wages, including one in St. Paul that ended with the arrest of 26 protesters—and plans in 100 cities for fast food strikes this very Thursday. A Wal-Mart food drive gathering Thanksgiving donations for its own underpaid employees. Even conservatives calling for a raise in the minimum wage.

Something is in the air. Whether it’s the generosity of holiday spirits or just people finally reaching a breaking point with the status quo, Americans are restless; we want change. And now, when people are paying attention to the plight of the struggling worker, is a rare opportunity to actually make things happen.

When I first joined Women Employed, there was a different kind of restlessness in the air. This was in the 70s, and women were getting fed up with those who outright opposed us getting into managerial and professional jobs. They said we weren’t capable, that we were only working for “pin money” anyway, and that we belonged at home.

WE was founded by women who wanted to change that world—and we succeeded. This year marked our 40th anniversary, and we have plenty to celebrate. In the past four decades, women have reshaped the American workplace. Our progress can be seen in laws against pregnancy discrimination and sexual harassment, family leave policies, and the breadth of opportunities available to women today, especially those with college degrees.

But celebrating women’s progress all too often obscures the reality that many women are still struggling just to get by. Although the advances of the past 40 years have given women many more opportunities, not all of us have been able to take advantage of them; millions have been left behind.

One way to think of it is to imagine that women today live on two different planets. On the first planet, women work in professional, managerial, or union jobs and earn salaries high enough to support a family. We have paid sick time, vacation time, health insurance. And we think of that as standard. Things aren’t perfect—women still struggle with glass ceilings, bad attitudes, and pay issues. But there’s some flexibility to deal with the demands of work and family, and women with education and advantages are doing better than they ever have before.

On the other planet are the millions of women who work hard in jobs we all depend on—jobs in restaurants, retail, call centers, day care centers, and the homes of our elderly parents.  Their wages are far too low. 17 million women today—almost a third of the female workforce—are earning less than $12 an hour. They have no paid sick time or vacation time and limited, if any, access to benefits. They get little or no respect for the work they do, and their hard work doesn’t lift them out of poverty. Their struggles are often invisible or ignored, even though their poverty hurts our society’s children, our communities, and our economy.

This can’t continue. We have to say no to having one world of work for women with education and advantages and a vastly inferior world of work for others. We need to shine the spotlight on those low-income working women who work their days serving meals to others but can barely feed their own children, the women who take care of our bedridden family members but don’t get paid sick days themselves.

We’ve cracked the glass ceiling—in some cases, we’ve even shattered it. But we can’t just look up; we have to look down. We need to raise the floor. Fortunately, there are some specific ways to do this, and the recent movement to increase the minimum wage is one of them. If we just raised the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour over a period of years—a proposal that President Obama has just backed—we would generate an estimated $32 billion in new economic activity and an estimated 140,000 new full-time jobs. We need to expand the right to earned sick time—and make sure that current movements to block states from ever being able to mandate paid sick days are stopped in their tracks. We need to ensure that more workplaces have policies that guarantee equal opportunity, fairness, and respect for family responsibilities—not just for higher-ups, but at every level of employment. We need to create stronger career pathways by enabling low-income women to get the education and training they need to advance.

This won’t be easy. The fact that we’re still fighting some of the same fights as when WE was founded (read: the wage gap barely changed in the last decade) shows just how long-term this struggle is. But the last 40 years offers plenty of inspiration to face future obstacles. In the 70s, we were dealing with problems no one had even given names to—sexual harassment, gender wage gap, wage theft. Today, we don’t only have words for these things, we’ve put laws in place to protect women against them. Time and again, we’ve made history. But there’s plenty left to be made.

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